Description:Communication technologies and travel have allowed people to establish social ties across vast distances. This course explores cultural assimilation, acculturation, reconfiguration, and subversion as practiced by communities and groups who are no longer nation-bound. Students research larger networks of flows that cross urban, regional, and national boundaries. They analyze the circulation of goods, ideas, people, and finances as new organizational forms and find points of intervention in order to improve them. Emphasis is placed on creating and managing multiple partnerships, both in terms of communication and work flow. Students also incorporate those affected by a project into the design process. They are expected to identify and contact community members in order to conduct informed interventions into global flows. As this project can take on different shapes (systems, protocols, sites, spaces, maps, services), students must be able to defend the form their project takes.